NEW IDEA DAVID BAIN EXCLUSIVE

TV ONE have just shot an interview with me for tonight's news, about the David Bain exclusive in this week's New Idea magazine, and whether or not it is a good scoop.

In one sense it is - it's what journos call a "good get" and all of our media outlets would have been keen to have it. After all, Bain is someone once convicted of killing five members of his family, who has been found not guilty after spending many years in prison. New Idea editor Hayley McLarin is a good and hard-working women's magazine editor. I don't doubt that she will have worked her contacts and done the necessary groundwork to secure the interview, but of course it is also more than likely that money changed hands. Today's Sunday newspapers are speculating that the price for this two-part story could have been as much as $50,000. That seems a lot for these tough financial times in journalism, but at $25,000 for each of the two parts of the story, it may well be possible. Paying this kind of money for big exclusives is certainly not unheard of for our weekly women's magazines.

So because many readers will be suspicious that they may be reading a piece of chequebook journalism, the scoop is compromised. More savvy readers may well ask themselves - if Bain was paid for the article did that give him control over what questions were asked and what was written? Did he get to vet the questions in advance and did he get copy approval of the final piece? It is certainly a very soft story - there are no questions about why Bain thinks his father killed his family and how he now feels about that, and there is nothing about why some of the forensic evidence seems so incriminating to Bain junior. Of course I haven't seen next week's part two of the interview yet, but I'd be surprised if it contains those harder questions. In the end it is a feature piece for a women's magazine.

I don't know what Bain's motives were for doing the story. They may have been purely financial - no doubt he needs the money after so many years in jail. He may also want to tell his side of the story. But if the latter was the case, picking a soft women's magazine to do so probably doesn't help his cause. The roughly 50 per cent of New Zealanders who believe he is not guilty will no doubt still think so after reading the New Idea piece. But conversely the other 50 per cent who have misgivings about the not guilty verdict aren't likely to change their minds either. In fact their opinion of David Bain may worsen if they feel that he has now profited from a terrible crime.

If Bain had allowed himself to be interviewed for a serious current affairs media outlet like TV ONE's Sunday programme or The Listener, and if he'd had some convincing answers to the tough questions, that might have done more for his reputation and P.R. But I guess it was always unlikely that he would take that path, especially bearing in mind that it is mainly the women's magazines who are known to pay for stories in this country.

So to answer the original question - yes it is a good scoop for New Idea, and it will no doubt sell some magazines for them. But it is a compromised scoop, and I doubt that it will be a P.R. triumph for David Bain and his supporters either.